APRIL 2013
Peace Operations, the African Union,
and the United Nations:
Toward More Effective Partnerships
ARTHUR BOUTELLIS and PAUL D. WILLIAMS
Cover Image: New AU-UN Deputy Joint
Special Representative Arrives in North
Darfur. Aïchatou Mindaoudou
Souleymane (left), Deputy Joint Special
Representative for Political Affairs in
the African Union-United Nations
Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID),
arrives at El Fasher, North Darfur,
Sudan. June 30, 2011. UN Photo/Olivier
Chassot.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ARTHUR BOUTELLIS is a Research Fellow, Adviser to the
Peace Operations and Africa Programs at the International
Peace Institute (IPI).
PAUL D. WILLIAMS is a Non-resident Senior Adviser at IPI
and Associate Professor in the Elliott School of
International Affairs at the George Washington University,
where he is also Associate Director of the Security Policy
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this
paper represent those of the authors
and not necessarily those of IPI. IPI
welcomes consideration of a wide
range of perspectives in the pursuit of
a well-informed debate on critical
policies and issues in international
affairs.
Studies program.
IPI Publications
Adam Lupel, Editor and Senior Fellow
Marie O’Reilly, Associate Editor
Thong Nguyen, Editorial Assistant
and at Security Council Report, who were willing to be
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors wish to express their thanks to those at the
African Union and the United Nations, in Addis Ababa and
in New York, at permanent missions to the United Nations,
interviewed for this project. They are also grateful to all
those who provided feedback on early drafts, including
Cedric de Coning and Linnéa Gelot, as well as all the
Suggested Citation:
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams,
“Peace Operations, the African Union,
and the United Nations: Toward More
Effective Partnerships in Peace
Operations,” New York: International
Peace Institute, April 2013.
participants to the informal roundtable discussion on AUUN partnerships in peace operations organized at IPI on
February 28, 2013. Finally, the authors thank Adam Lupel
and Marie O’Reilly for their editorial support.
IPI owes a debt of gratitude to its many donors for their
generous support. In particular, IPI would like to thank the
© by International Peace Institute, 2013
All Rights Reserved
www.ipinst.org
government of Germany for making this publication
possible. In addition, IPI would like to thank the African
Union Commission in Addis Ababa and the Office of the
Permanent Observer for the African Union to the United
Nations in New York for their guidance and support
throughout this project.
CONTENTS
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
UN-AU Collaboration on Peace
and Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Dynamic Partnerships in Peace
Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
The AMISOM Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Ongoing Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Annex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
ORGANIZATIONAL CHART
iii
Abbreviations
ACOTA
Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance
AFISMA
African-led International Support Mission in Mali
AMIB
African Mission in Burundi
AMIS
African Mission in Sudan
AMISEC
African Union Mission for Support to the Elections in the Comoros
AMISOM
African Union Mission in Somalia
AMU
Arab Maghreb Union
APSA
African Peace and Security Architecture
ASF
African Standby Force
AU
African Union
CAR
Central African Republic
CEN-SAD
Community of Sahel-Saharan States
CEWS
Continental Early Warning System
COMESA
Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa
DFS
UN Department of Field Support
DPA
UN Department of Political Affairs
DRC
Democratic Republic of the Congo
EAC
East African Community
ECCAS
Economic Community of Central African States
DPKO
UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations
ECOMOG
ECOWAS Monitoring Group
ECOWAS
Economic Community of West African States
EU
European Union
EUFOR
EU Force
FOMUC
Multinational Force in the CAR
GPOI
G8 Global Peace Operations Initiative
iv
ABBREVIATIONS
IGAD
Intergovernmental Authority on Development
JTF
UN-AU Joint Task Force on Peace and Security
LRA
Lord’s Resistance Army
MAES
AU Electoral and Security Assistance Mission to the Comoros
MICOPAX
Mission for the Consolidation of Peace in the CAR
MIOC
AU Military Observer Mission in the Comoros
PCC
Police-Contributing Country
PSC
Peace and Security Council of the African Union
RCI-LRA
Regional Cooperation Initiative for the Elimination of the LRA
REC
African Regional Economic Community
SADC
Southern African Development Community
TCC
Troop-Contributing Country
UN
United Nations
UNAMID
AU-UN Hybrid Operation in Darfur
UNOAU
UN Office to the African Union
UNPOS
UN Political Office for Somalia
UNSOA
UN Support Office for AMISOM
1
Executive Summary
• harmonizing the decision-making processes of
the two councils;
Both the United Nations (UN) Security Council
and the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the
African Union (AU) have a vested interest in
conducting more effective peace operations in
Africa. Both councils want to build on the various
UN-AU peace and security coordination
mechanisms that have been established since 2006
and support the implementation of the AU’s
principle of “non-indifference.” In many respects,
considerable progress has been made with the UN
and AU enjoying a deep, multidimensional and
maturing relationship. Yet disagreements remain
over how best to respond to particular peace and
security challenges in Africa, and the AU still
suffers from important capability gaps with respect
to peace operations.
• filling some of the key capability gaps in the AU’s
representation in New York; and
This paper analyzes the evolution of collaboration between the two councils on peace operations
and asks how the institutions can cooperate more
effectively in this area. After providing an overview
of UN-AU collaboration on peace and security
issues in general and peace operations in particular,
we analyze the AU Mission in Somalia as a crucial
case that exemplifies some of the positive and
negative aspects of the UN-AU relationship. The
paper then summarizes some of the ongoing
challenges that will need to be overcome if the two
councils are to optimize their collaboration and
deploy legitimate and effective peace operations. It
concludes by offering some practical recommendations for enhancing UN-AU relations in this area.
The central challenges blocking more effective
AU-UN collaboration on peace operations can be
identified across three dimensions: the strategic,
political relationship between the two councils; the
bureaucratic and organizational interaction
between the two councils; and intra-AU dynamics,
namely, relations among the AU Commission, the
Peace and Security Council, and AU member states.
We offer practical recommendations designed to
address each of these dimensions by the following:
• developing more efficient communication
mechanisms between the elected African
members of the UN Security Council and the
AU’s Peace and Security Council in Addis Ababa.
Introduction
This paper analyzes the recent history of relations
between the United Nations (UN) Security Council
and the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the
African Union (AU) with respect to peace
operations.1 Collaboration in this area was born out
of the comparative advantages of both institutions,
but it has suffered from several problems, including
the AU’s weak bureaucratic, logistical, and financial
capabilities. This has resulted in an unequal
partnership where the AU’s major peace operations
remain dependent on the UN and other partners
for support.
Nevertheless, peace operations in Africa are once
again in high demand with possible new deployments in the Central African Republic (CAR), the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mali,
and Sudan. UN deployments in Africa remain
steady with approximately 80 percent of all blue
helmets deployed on the continent, although the
UN is currently debating whether to deploy
another large UN multidimensional peace
operation to Mali.2 AU deployments have also
increased to an all-time high, largely due to AU-UN
collaboration in the Somalia and Mali theaters.
Nevertheless, in an important statement of its
position on the relationship with the UN, in
January 2012 the AU lamented that “while consultations [between the two councils] represent a
significant step in the right direction, they are yet to
translate into a common understanding of the
foundation of the cooperation between these two
organs.”3 But this may be changing. Both councils
want to move forward and build on the various
1 We use “peace operations” as a generic term for UN and AU field missions. The UN generally uses the terms “peacekeeping operations” (PKOs) and “special
political missions” (SPMs), while the AU refers to its missions as “peace support operations” (PSOs).
2 See Arthur Boutellis, “Mali’s Peacekeeping Mission,” IPI Global Observatory, March 12, 2013, available at
www.theglobalobservatory.org/component/myblog/malia-s-peacekeeping-mission-full-fledged-behemoth-or-have-lessons-been-learned-.html .
3 AU Peace and Security Council, Report of the Chairperson of the Commission on the Partnership Between the African Union and the United Nations on Peace and
Security: Towards Greater Strategic and Political Coherence, AU Doc. PSC/PR/2. (CCCVII), January 9, 2012, para. 44.
2
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
UN-AU peace and security coordination
mechanisms that have been established since 2006
(see Annex) and support the implementation of the
AU’s principle of “non-indifference.” Of particular
importance, in February 2012, the UN Security
Council endorsed the expansion of the UN support
package for the AU Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)
and an increase of its uniformed personnel from
12,000 to 17,731. This decision followed a joint AUUN planning process, which both organizations
praised. In late 2012 and early 2013, the UN and AU
both conducted strategic reviews of their engagement with Somalia and in March 2013, UN Security
Council Resolution 2093 extended AMISOM’s
mandate for another year with the same UN
logistical support package, but in tandem with a
new expanded UN special political mission.
The Security Council’s endorsement of an
African-led Regional Cooperation Initiative against
the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in June 2012 was
also the result of a collaborative approach that
included joint UN-AU assessment missions. A
similar collaborative AU-UN approach has since
been replicated in responding to the crisis in Mali,
together with the Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS). This led to the UN
Security Council authorizing an African-led
International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA)
in December 2012.
These cases of improved UN-AU collaboration
have been sensitive to the challenges of the specific
contexts in question and are the fruit of years of
technical support and partnerships forged since the
Figure 1: Uniformed Personnel Deployed by African Union Member States in UN and AU
Missions (July 31st annual)
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
creation of the AU.4 But this has not always been the
case. During their May 2011 annual consultative
meeting, for instance, members of the two councils
exhibited major differences over how best to
respond to the crises in Libya and Côte d’Ivoire and
over the financing of the AU Mission in Somalia.
Cases of successful UN-AU collaboration on peace
operations have thus remained largely context
specific, resulting from the convergence of the
political agendas of the UN Security Council and
the AU’s Peace and Security Council.
The current crisis in Mali also exposed different
perspectives of the two organizations, this time
over financial rather than political issues: although
the UN Security Council authorized AFISMA, it
did not follow the AU’s request to create a UNfunded support package for the mission as it had
done in the case of AMISOM. As it turned out,
France’s “Operation Serval,” launched on January
11, 2013, dramatically altered both the dynamics on
the ground and the terms of the international
response. Following a request from the Malian
authorities to counter the advance of Islamist
militants, some 4,000 French troops conducted a
rapid series of operations, which by the end of
January had retaken all the major population
centers in northern Mali and displaced the rebels.
This rapid success prompted an acceleration of
AFISMA’s deployment timetable. Originally
planned for September 2013 African states began
deploying troops immediately with the help of
various Western donors and pledged approximately
6,000 soldiers. In the absence of a UN support
package, however, the AU organized an emergency
donor conference on January 29th in Addis Ababa
where donors pledged an initial $450 million in
support of AFISMA. The AU also decided to
allocate $50 million to AFISMA, which is the first
time in the history of the organization that its
budget has been used to support a non-UN peace
operation.5 By March 2013 AFISMA’s concept of
operations was adopted, which set the mission
strength at just under 9,450 uniformed personnel,
3
as Council discussions of a re-hatting into a UN
peacekeeping mission also began.
Despite the proliferation of UN-AU coordination
mechanisms and a growing mutual recognition that
each institution has its comparative advantages,
there is still significant scope for enhancing collaboration between the two councils. Moreover,
several factors suggest that the time is now ripe to
do so. First, the relatively cooperative joint
planning processes that have occurred with regard
to peace operations in Somalia (since late 2011) and
Mali (since mid-2012) and their subsequent
endorsement by the Security Council may signal
growing convergence in how the UN and AU
design peace operations. Moreover, the mutual
dependence we describe in this paper is encouraging the two organizations to put aside some of
their major differences for practical reasons in at
least some contexts. Second, the recent UN and AU
strategic reviews of their activities in Somalia also
provide an opportunity to reflect on common
lessons learned and how shared analysis might
enhance collaboration in this difficult theater.
Third, the appointment of the new chairperson of
the AU Commission in 2012 may provide an
opportunity to strengthen the AU politically, while
encouraging its member states to be more engaged
financially and to deploy more peacekeepers.
Fourth, the election to the UN Security Council of
Rwanda and Togo, both of which have made major
contributions to peace operations in recent years,
presents an opportunity for the further bridging of
gaps between the two councils and ensuring highlevel follow-up, in spite of the continental powers
South Africa and Nigeria no longer being on the
council.6 (Nevertheless, neither Rwanda nor Togo is
currently a member of the AU Peace and Security
Council or a major continental power.)
This paper analyzes these issues in five parts. The
first section provides an overview of UN-AU
collaboration on peace and security issues, while
the second section focuses on UN-AU collaboration with respect to peace operations. In the third
4 Prior to this the Organization of African Unity, the AU’s predecessor, had signed a cooperation agreement with the UN on November 15, 1965, which was updated
on October 9, 1990 by the two Secretaries-General of the two organizations. Further UN-OAU cooperation with regard to peacekeeping was called for in a variety
of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, perhaps most notably Security Council Resolution 1197 (September 18, 1998). This trend has continued
with the new AU, including through UN Security Council Resolutions 1809 (April 16, 2008) and 2033 (January 12, 2012).
5 See the "Introductory Remarks of the Chairperson of the Commission" of the Donor's Conference on Mali held in Addis Ababa on January 29, 2013 available at
www.peaceau.org/uploads/auc-speech-cp-donors-conference-mali-29-01-2013.pdf .
6 As of March 31, 2013, Rwanda was the 6th largest contributor of uniformed personnel to UN peacekeeping contributions, deploying 4,695, while Togo stood in 32nd
place with 710.
4
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
section, we provide a brief overview of the
AMISOM experience. This has been important not
only because it is the largest AU peace operation
ever conducted but because it stimulated a variety
of unprecedented mechanisms between the two
councils. The fourth section elaborates on some of
the ongoing challenges that will need to be
overcome if the two councils are to optimize their
collaboration and deploy legitimate and effective
peace operations. The fifth section sets out
practical recommendations for addressing these
challenges.
UN-AU Collaboration on
Peace and Security
Collaboration between the UN Security Council
and the AU on the specific issues arising from peace
operations does not take place in a political
vacuum. Rather, it occurs within the broader
context of the two institutions’ efforts to address a
wide range of peace and security challenges.
The basis for such collaboration is mutual
recognition of several important facts. The first is
that over the last decade, the majority of the UN
Security Council’s agenda has been occupied by
peace and security challenges in Africa.7 Second,
both institutions recognize that the UN Security
Council has the primary—but not exclusive—
responsibility for maintaining international peace
and security, including in Africa.8 But, third, both
institutions also acknowledge that no single organization alone can cope with the multitude of peace
and security challenges on the African continent. In
addition, both institutions recognize that while the
AU is an important source of political authority for
addressing peace and security challenges in Africa,
it lacks the necessary material and financial
capabilities to take decisive action alone to resolve
these problems.
It was the mutual recognition of these basic facts
that influenced the evolution of pragmatic and
context-specific forms of collaboration between the
7
8
9
two institutions. To date, this collaboration has
grown to encompass a variety of mechanisms that
are illustrated in the Annex. The first step was the
African Union’s decision to create a new peace and
security architecture (APSA) for the continent: this
would establish a variety of institutions in order to
address the entire spectrum of conflict management challenges from early warning and preventive
diplomacy to peace operations and post-war
peacebuilding initiatives.9 Shortly thereafter, the
UN agreed to assist in that endeavor through its
ten-year capacity-building program for the AU.
Individual members of the UN Security Council
have also helped with the development of the APSA
through various mechanisms, perhaps most
notably the G8++ Global Peace Operations
Initiative (GPOI) and the European Union’s (EU)
African Peace Facility, both of which started in
2004.
Since 2007, there have also been periodic
meetings between members of the UN Security
Council and the AU’s Peace and Security Council.
These meetings have discussed a variety of thematic
and country-specific items. Considerable tensions
arose when discussions turned to the strategic
relationship between the two councils, but they
were generally more cordial when discussing
specific policy questions, with the notable
exceptions of the early period of AMISOM and the
Libyan crisis of 2011. These meetings naturally
placed the African non-permanent members of the
UN Security Council in a particularly important
position, especially if they were also simultaneously
members of the AU Peace and Security Council
(see table 1).
The UN has also provided a variety of training
packages to the AU designed to improve the
performance of the PSC Secretariat and facilitate
more effective collaboration between the two
councils. The partnership underwent a series of
further important reforms in mid-2010 when three
important developments took place. First, on July 1,
2010, the UN established a new Office to the
In 2011, for example, Africa accounted for 68 percent of the UN Security Council’s meetings dealing with country-specific/regional situations. 2011 Highlights of
Security Council Practice (New York: UN Department of Political Affairs, June 2012), pp.2-3.
This is noted, for example, in Article 17(1) of the Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union (2002). Article 52 of
the UN Charter encourages regional arrangements to undertake peaceful resolution of local disputes, including peacekeeping missions, but Article 53 precludes the
use of force without prior Security Council authorization.
The main institutions of the APSA are the Peace and Security Council, the Continental Early Warning System (CEWS), the African Standby Force (ASF), the Panel
of the Wise, the Peace Fund, and the Military Staff Committee.
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
5
Table 1: African Non-Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, 2002-13
Year
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
African State
Cameroon
Cameroon
Algeria
Algeria
Ghana
Ghana
Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso
Nigeria
Nigeria
Morocco*
Morocco*
Guinea
Guinea
Benin
Benin
Republic of Congo
Republic of Congo
Libya
Libya
Gabon
Gabon
Togo
Togo
Mauritius
Angola
Angola
Tanzania
Tanzania
South Africa
South Africa
Uganda
Uganda
South Africa
South Africa
Rwanda
Bold: simultaneously a member of the AU Peace and Security Council
* Morocco is not a member of the African Union.
African Union (UNOAU) in Addis Ababa.10 Later
that same month the two councils also agreed to
undertake “collaborative field missions,” such as the
joint AU-UN multidisciplinary mission to the Sahel
in December 2011. These were intended to help
“enhance synergy in monitoring, assessment of
results and response strategies” to peace and
security challenges on the continent.11 And, third,
the UN and AU established the Joint Task Force on
Peace and Security (JTF). Meeting for the first time
in September 2010, the JTF is jointly chaired by the
Under-Secretaries-General of the UN Departments
of Political Affairs (DPA), Peacekeeping Operations
(DPKO), and Field Support (DFS), as well as the
AU Commissioners (for peace and security, and for
political affairs), and reviews specific issues and
countries of common interest to the two organizations.12
Despite the proliferation of mechanisms, the
evolving relationship between the two councils and
UN-AU collaboration more broadly continues to
confront four major (and one potential) challenges.
PRINCIPLE AND PRAGMATISM
The first challenge is generic to all efforts to
develop cooperative frameworks between multifaceted institutions, namely, that the existence of such
general frameworks does not automatically
generate consensus on how to act in particular
crises. Moreover, attempts to perfect and institutionalize collaborative mechanisms between the
two councils runs the risk of creating inflexible
structures that can become redundant when
powerful actors feel too constrained by such
mechanisms and work around them to create facts
on the ground. While most members of both
councils appear to support the idea that UN-AU
cooperation would be enhanced by moving from
context-specific to more predictable mechanisms,
such initiatives also run into the perennial problem
of how to operationalize the spirit of Chapter VIII
of the UN Charter of 1945, which was designed in
a very different era of global-regional security
collaboration and preceded the creation of most of
today’s regional organizations. Here, two questions
10 While UNOAU was officially established on July 1, 2010, it did not become effectively operational until late 2011. UNOAU effectively replaced various UN entities
that were previously entrusted with supporting AU peace operations. These included the AU Peace Support Team (PST) established in 2007 in DPKO; the Strategic
Planning and Management Unit (SPMU) established as a predecessor to the AU PSOD to launch and manage AMISOM, which also included UN planners; and
the Darfur Integrated Task Force (DITF) also in Addis Ababa, which included seconded staff from both the UN and EU in support of the AU mission in Darfur
(AMIS) and was disbanded when UNAMID was created.
11 AU Doc. PSC/PR/2.(CCCVII), January 9, 2012, p.11.
12 In January 2012, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the UN-AU Joint Task Force “has proven to be an effective mechanism for consultations on an array of
issues including Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan.” Remarks to the UN Security Council, January 12, 2012, available at
http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_full.asp?statID=1425#.ULzjIlLO-So . At its sixth consultative meeting held in Addis Ababa in January
2013, the JTF reviewed the situations in Mali, Somalia, eastern DRC, Central African Republic, Guinea Bissau as well as the AU-led Regional Cooperation
Initiative against the LRA, and the activities of the AU’s Panel of the Wise on election-related issues in Africa.
6
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
must be addressed: (1) what should a strategic
partnership between the UN Security Council and
a regional arrangement entail in practice; and (2) to
what extent can the UN Security Council forge a
special relationship with the AU without setting a
precedent for other regions of the world? Given the
large proportion of time the UN Security Council
spends addressing peace and security challenges in
Africa, a good case can be made that business-asusual is not the correct response.
WHAT DOES THE AU WANT?
A second issue is figuring out how to interpret the
AU’s position “that its requests should, at a
minimum, be duly considered by the UN Security
Council.”13 At the UN Security Council, this has
stimulated significant political differences between
some African and non-African members. On the
African side, some states feel the UN Security
Council does not always respect the AU’s views. For
example, at the January 2012 UN Security Council
debate on cooperation between the UN and
regional organizations in maintaining international
peace and security, Kenya’s then foreign minister,
Moses Wetangula, argued that “The practice in the
past two years seems to indicate an undesirable
trend that appears to be selective on the part of the
Security Council and that seems to disregard full
consideration of the position and/or recommendations of the AU or its organs.”14 At the other end of
the spectrum, US Ambassador Susan Rice,
emphasized that,
… some Security Council members feel that African
Union member States have not always provided
unified or consistent views on key issues, and that the
African Union has on occasion been slow to act on
urgent matters. Beneath those perceptions and
frustrations, however, is a deeper issue, that is who is
on first?... The Security Council is not subordinate to
other bodies, or to the schedules or capacities of
regional or subregional groups.... [UN-regional]
cooperation cannot be on the basis that the regional
organization independently decides the policy and
that the United Nations Member States simply bless it
and pay for it. There can be no blank check, either
politically or financially.15
13
14
15
16
UN RELATIONS WITH AFRICA’S
SUB-REGIONAL ARRANGEMENTS
A third challenge is the unresolved question of the
UN Security Council’s relationship with the African
regional economic communities (RECs), which
also stems, in part, from the vague nature of
Chapter VIII of the UN Charter. In practice, the AU
has tried to establish a subsidiarity principle to
harmonize and coordinate its relations with the
continent’s RECs and relevant peace and security
coordinating mechanisms.16 In theory, therefore, if
the UN Security Council could coordinate its
position with the AU, it should, by default, also be
coordinated with the relevant REC (or RECs).
However, Chapter VIII of the UN Charter does not
distinguish between regional and sub-regional
arrangements, thus the AU and the RECs all constitute regional arrangements and they do not
necessarily exist in a hierarchical relationship.
This opens the door for several potential issues to
arise. First, there is the question of which regional
arrangement the UN Security Council should
coordinate with when different arrangements take
different positions on particular peace and security
challenges on the African continent. This question
was posed most sharply by the crisis in Libya in
early 2011 where the AU and the League of Arab
States took very different positions on how to
respond (and the UN endorsed the Arab League’s
position rather than the AU’s).
A second challenge could emerge when the
relationship between the AU and the relevant REC
(or RECs) is unclear and their policy responses to a
particular crisis diverge, as occurred between the
AU and ECOWAS during the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire
during late 2010 and 2011 or in the initial international response to the crisis in Mali in 2012.
According to Article 16.1(a) of the Protocol Relating
to the Establishment of the PSC (2002), the PSC shall
“harmonize and coordinate the activities of
Regional Mechanisms in the field of peace, security
and stability to ensure that these activities are consistent with the objectives and principles of the Union
AU Doc. PSC/PR/2.(CCCVII), January 9, 2012, p.12.
See UN Doc. S/PV.6702, January 12, 2012, pp.9-10.
UN Doc. S/PV.6702, January 12, 2012, p.15.
The AU has signed a memorandum of understanding on peace and security issues with eight RECs (AMU, CEN-SAD, COMESA, EAC, ECCAS, ECOWAS, IGAD,
and SADC) and two coordinating mechanisms (EASBRIGCOM and NARC). See Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Area of Peace and Security
Between the African Union, the Regional Economic Communities and the Coordinating Mechanisms of the Regional Standby Brigades of Eastern Africa and Northern
Africa (Signed in Algiers, June 2008).
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
[emphasis added].” However, while the 2008
Memorandum of Understanding among the AU
and eight RECs also emphasized the “recognition
of, and respect for, the primary responsibility of the
Union in the maintenance and promotion of peace,
security and stability in Africa” (Article 4ii), and
called for the AU to coordinate the efforts of these
parties to harmonize their views when dealing with
the UN (Article 21.1), it also called for “adherence
to the principles of subsidiarity, complementarity
and comparative advantage” (Article 4iv). Critics
see this latter clause as watering down the AU’s
leadership role in relation to the RECs. Cases where
a REC and the AU adopted different policies could
considerably complicate the issue of the UN
Security Council’s collaboration with African
actors.
A third complicating factor stems from the
overlapping but distinct memberships apparent in
how the AU’s “regions” are defined for peace and
security purposes. Most notable are the different
but sometimes overlapping memberships apparent
in the eight RECs (see map 1), the five regional
standby forces, and the five regions that are used as
the basis for membership of the AU’s Peace and
Security Council.
Finally, difficulties can also arise when the
available REC frameworks do not map neatly onto
the policy challenge at hand. As the recent case of
Mali demonstrates, ECOWAS mechanisms alone
were not optimally configured for responding to
the crisis, which required instruments that involved
Algeria, Chad, and other non-ECOWAS states.
DIVERGENT VIEWS OF PEACE
OPERATIONS
A fourth challenge is the divergent views on peace
operations evident at the UN and AU. The basic
contours of their philosophical disagreements
about peace operations can be summarized quickly
as follows. The UN’s peacekeeping philosophy
derives from the lessons learned over the past six
decades and nearly seventy missions. These are that
7
peacekeeping is unlikely to succeed where one or
more of the following conditions are not in place:
(1) a peace to keep, where the signing of a ceasefire
or peace agreement is one (but not the only)
important indicator of when parties are genuinely
seeking peace; (2) positive regional engagement; (3)
the full backing of a united Security Council; and
(4) a clear and achievable mandate with resources
to match.17 UN peacekeeping also continues to
operate based on three core principles: 1) consent
of the parties, particularly of the host country
government; 2) impartiality; and 3) non-use of
force except in self-defense and defense of the
mandate. These principles come under intense
scrutiny in some conflict zones and have at times
limited the efficacy of the UN’s peacekeepers. This
has also led some African states to criticize the UN
for failing to provide an adequate response to the
changing nature of peace and security challenges
on the continent, which may require different
responses (such as Somalia and eastern DRC), and
for lacking consistency in the application of UN
principles when providing logistical and financial
support to the AU’s enforcement mission in
Somalia (AMISOM) but not in Mali (AFISMA).
Certain African troop contributors have also
displayed a greater willingness to engage in peace
enforcement activities on the continent, whether
within the framework of an AU mission (AMISOM
and AFISMA) or a UN mission (the intervention
brigade within MONUSCO).18
The AU’s philosophy, of what it calls peace
support operations, is significantly different, in part
because they are intended to address the entire
spectrum of conflict management challenges. As
articulated in its major report on UN-AU cooperation released in January 2012, the AU argued that
the UN’s peacekeeping doctrine renders it unable to
“deploy a peace mission ... in a situation like
Somalia ... even though significant advances have
been made on the ground” [in this case by
AMISOM]. Unlike the UN, the AU has therefore
developed “a different peacekeeping doctrine;
17 United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines (New York: DPKO/DFS, 2008), pp.49-51.
18 The UN Security Council passed Resolution 2098 on March 29, 2013, calling for the deployment of an “intervention brigade” that can use offensive combat
operations to “neutralize and disarm” Congolese rebel groups, in particular the M23 rebels responsible for temporarily taking over the city of Goma in the eastern
DRC at the end of last year. The brigade would be composed of 3,069 troops from Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries notably South
Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi, and will deploy for one year within MONUSCO and under the command of the MONUSCO force commander. Some MONUSCO
troop contributors have expressed concerns that such enforcement operations may threaten the safety of the entire peacekeeping force. Others have argued that this
is not that new since MONUSCO is already authorized to conduct offensive operations under its Chapter VII mandate, under which the Rules of Engagement
(ROE) authorize the use of force beyond self-defense.
Map 1
8
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
9
the terms of the UN Charter, however, it seems
clear that the use of military force against a
sovereign government can only be used in selfdefense or with the express authorization of the UN
Security Council.21 To date this issue has not posed
significant problems because the AU has not
invoked Article 4(h) to justify a humanitarian
military intervention, although it has invoked it in
relation to the trial of Hissène Habré, the former
president of Chad.
instead of waiting for a peace to keep, the AU views
peacekeeping as an opportunity to establish peace
before keeping it.”19
These different views can give rise to significantly
divergent notions of the purpose, configuration,
and force requirements for peace operations within
the UN and AU. Arguably the most pertinent
example of such divergence is the AMISOM
operation where in December 2006 the UN and AU
disagreed on whether the deployment of a peace
operation was the appropriate response to the
situation in Mogadishu. This crucial case is
discussed in more detail in Section 3 (below).
Dynamic Partnerships in
Peace Operations
A POTENTIAL CHALLENGE:
AU HUMANITARIAN MILITARY
INTERVENTION
A fifth potential challenge revolves around the issue
of “humanitarian military intervention”: which
entity can authorize the use of military force for
humanitarian purposes on the African continent?20
Here, the source of tension is Article 4(h) of the
Constitutive Act of the AU, which the Assembly
claims gives it the right to intervene in its member
states in “grave circumstances,” namely, genocide,
crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Under
Collaboration between the UN and the AU on
peace and security issues in Africa has arguably
been most dynamic in the area of peace operations.
During the 1990s, most of the large peace
operations in Africa were conducted by the UN or
by African regional arrangements, particularly by
ECOWAS, which deployed troops in several civil
wars in West Africa, only receiving the UN Security
Council’s blessing post facto (see table 2). During
the 2000s, however, there was a dramatic increase
in UN peacekeeping, especially in Africa where the
Table 2: Peace Operations Conducted by African Regional Organizations, 1990-200322
Mission
Location
Duration
Size (approx. max)
Main Task(s)
ECOMOG 1
Liberia
1990-9
15,000
Enforcement
ECOMOG 2
Sierra Leone
1997-2000
7,000
Enforcement
MISAB
ECOMOG 3
Operation Boleas (SADC)
CAR
1997-8
1,100
Peacebuilding
Guinea-Bissau
1998-9
c.750
Peacebuilding / Enforcement
Lesotho
1998-9
3,850
Enforcement
Operation Sovereign
Legitimacy (SADC)
DRC
1998-2002
15,500
Enforcement
CEN-SAD operation
CAR
2001-2
300
Peacebuilding
FOMUC
(became MICOPAX)
CAR
2002-Present
380
Peacebuilding
Sudan
2003-5
41
Observation
Côte d’Ivoire
2003-4
c.1,500
Peacebuilding
Liberia
2003-4
3,600
Peacebuilding
IGAD Verification
Monitoring Team
ECOFORCE
(became ECOMICI)
ECOMIL
19 AU Doc. PSC/PR/2.(CCCVII), January 9, 2012, para. 71.
20 We define humanitarian military intervention as the use of military force by external actors without host state consent aimed at preventing or ending genocide and
mass atrocities.
21 Article 53 of the UN Charter states: “no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorization of the
Security Council.”
22 Source: Paul D. Williams, War and Conflict in Africa (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p.186.
10
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
majority of UN “blue helmets” were deployed to
some of the organization’s largest missions in the
two Sudans and the DRC (see table 3).
The creation of the African Union in 2002
opened a new era in African-led peace operations,
with three major missions in Burundi (AMIB,
2003), Darfur (AMIS, 2004), and Somalia
(AMISOM, 2007), as well as a number of smaller
monitoring and electoral support and security
missions, principally in the Comoros (see table 4).
While the missions in Burundi, Sudan, and Somalia
were initially conceived as interim “bridging”
missions in preparation for a larger and longerterm multidimensional UN presence, they actually
evolved into different forms of longer-term
partnerships between the UN and AU rather than
simple takeovers.
It is also notable that during this period the
ability of African states to field considerable
numbers of uniformed peacekeepers increased
significantly. This is in large part due to the support
provided in various train and equip programs,
perhaps most notably by the US Africa
Contingency Operations Training and Assistance
(ACOTA) program. Since 2009, African states have
contributed some 35,000 UN peacekeepers (see
figure 1) in addition to those deployed on the AU’s
missions. Nevertheless, it is notable that the
majority of these uniformed peacekeepers are
coming from less than 20 percent of the AU’s
members (see figure 2).23
These UN-AU partnerships were, however, the
result of particular political and security circumstances that motivated the two organizations to
develop pragmatic solutions. They did not result
from a joint AU-UN assessment of the situation
and shared vision of how to address it. Indeed, the
African Mission in Burundi (AMIB) was set up in
large part because the UN Security Council would
not authorize a peacekeeping operation in the
absence of a comprehensive ceasefire agreement.
AMIB thereafter usefully prepared the ground for
Figure 2: Origin of UN Uniformed Peacekeepers, 2000-2012 (December 31st annual)
23 The top seven African Union TCC/PCCs to UN peacekeeping operations have varied since 2000, but as of January 2013 they were Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria,
Rwanda, Senegal, and South Africa.
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
11
Table 3: United Nations Peacekeeping Operations in Africa, 2000-2012
Mission
Location
Duration
Size (approx. max)
Main Task(s)
MINURSO
Western Sahara
1991-
237
Peacekeeping
MINURCA
UNAMSIL
CAR
Sierra Leone
1998-00
1999-05
1,350
17,670
MONUC
DRC
1999-2010
c.18,600
UNMEE
Ethiopia-Eritrea
2000-08
4,200
Peacebuilding
Peacebuilding / Enforcement /
Civilian protection
Peacebuilding / Enforcement /
Civilian protection
Peacekeeping
MINUCI
UNMIL
Côte d’Ivoire
Liberia
2003-04
2003-
75
c.16,100
UNOCI
Côte d’Ivoire
2004-
c.9,200
Burundi
2004-06
c.6,100
Sudan
2005-11
c.10,100
CAR and Chad
2007-10
3,000
Sudan
2008-
16,400
DRC
2010-
c.19,100
UNMISS
South Sudan
2011-
c.7,100
UNISFA
Abyei (Sudan /
South Sudan)
2011-
c.4,000
ONUB
UNMIS
MINURCAT
UNAMID
MONUSCO
Observation
Peacebuilding /
Civilian protection
Peacebuilding / Enforcement /
Civilian protection
Peacebuilding /
Civilian protection
Peacebuilding /
Civilian protection
Civilian protection /
Humanitarian assistance
Peacebuilding /
Civilian protection
Peacebuilding / Enforcement /
Civilian protection
Peacebuilding /
Civilian protection
Demilitarize Abyei /
Civilian protection
Table 4: African Union Peace Operations, 2003-2012
Mission
Location
Size
Duration (approx.
max)
AU Mission in
Burundi (AMIB)
Burundi
2003-4
AU Military
Observer Mission
in the Comoros
(MIOC)
AU Mission in
Sudan (AMIS)
Comoros
2004
Darfur
2004-7
Burundi
2006-9
[re-hatted into
UNAMID]
Special Task Force
Burundi
AU Mission for
Comoros
Support to the
Elections in the
Comoros (AMISEC)
AU Mission in
Somalia
Somalia (AMISOM)
AU Electoral
and Security Assistance Mission to the
Comoros (MAES)
Operation Democracy in Comoros
3,250
2007-
17,731
Comoros
2008
Key TCCs/
PCCs
TCCs + EU
support
a) TCCs +
donors
b) UN +
donors
350 TCCs + EU +
Arab League
1,350 + 450 TCCs +
Comoros donors
Main Task(s)
South Africa Peacebuilding
South Africa Observation
c. 7,700 TCCs + EU + Nigeria,
UN support Rwanda,
packages
South Africa,
Senegal,
Ghana
c. 750 TCC
South Africa
1,260
2007-8
TCCs +
donors
41 TCCs
2006
Comoros
Finance
Method
Peacekeeping /
Civilian
protection
Main Achievements
Enforcement; DDR;
facilitated humanitarian assistance
Facilitated and secured
the electoral process
Protected (some)
civilians, facilitated
humanitarian
assistance
VIP protection VIP protection for
negotiating rebel
leaders; DDR
South Africa Election
Monitored elections;
Monitor
keep security forces
out of elections
Uganda,
Burundi,
later Kenya
Protection of
government,
counterinsurgency
South Africa, Election
Tanzania
support
Tanzania,
Sudan
Enforcement
Protected TFG;
degraded insurgents;
facilitated humanitarian relief
Failed to facilitate
restoration of constitutional authorities in
Anjouan
Removed incumbent
illegitimate regime
12
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
the deployment of a UN peacekeeping mission
(ONUB) twelve months later, and most of its
approximately 3,000 troops “re-hatted” into the UN
mission. While AMIB faced considerable logistical
and funding challenges, it contributed to stabilizing
the country and demonstrated a willingness and
ability of the AU and some of its African member
states, to take on peace enforcement mandates.
When the Government of Burundi asked for the
departure of UN peacekeepers in 2006, it agreed to
the AU maintaining one battalion in Burundi,
which proved crucial in supporting the follow-on
UN peacebuilding presence (BINUB) as it carried
out the remaining tasks of the peace process.
and cheaper than the UN, which tends to deploy
larger and more costly multidimensional
operations.24 Second, AU-mandated troops can
carry out peace enforcement tasks in contexts
where the absence of a comprehensive ceasefire
agreement or political settlement may prevent the
UN from deploying a peacekeeping operation,
and/or where UN troop-contributing countries
(TCCs) would be more reluctant to send troops.
Third, the AU and African troops can sometimes
add political legitimacy and leverage to a peace
operation, especially in contexts where the host
government and/or sub-region may not welcome a
UN presence.
Similarly, in 2006, the UN and AU had agreed to
replace the African Mission in Sudan (AMIS) with
a larger and better equipped UN peacekeeping
operation. After the Sudanese government opposed
the deployment of such a UN force and insisted on
the mission retaining its predominantly African
character, AMIS was eventually replaced by a firstof-its-kind UN-AU Hybrid Mission in Darfur
(UNAMID) at the end of 2007. In the interim
period, AMIS was assisted by an EU support
package as well as the UN’s so-called “light” and
“heavy” assistance packages, which helped with
planning functions and logistics. In the lead up to
the creation of UNAMID, the UN assistance
mission to the AU in Addis Ababa, as well as the
two joint AU-UN technical missions carried out in
Darfur and the joint reports to the two councils, all
contributed to starting technical cooperation
between the two organizations, which would later
reappear in relation to AMISOM. As discussed in
section 3 of this paper, in late 2006, the AU had also
initially envisaged a UN operation taking over from
its mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and requested
the UN to support the planning and preparation for
AMISOM’s deployment.
In sum, where the political agendas of the two
councils coincided, a division of labor evolved
whereby the AU provided troops and the UN and
other partners provided increasingly comprehensive logistical and financial support packages.
These three experiences helped both organizations agree that no single actor can effectively
address the entire peacekeeping burden in Africa.
They also shed light on the comparative advantages
of the AU over the UN in certain African contexts.
First, the AU (and regional organizations) can
deploy troops from neighboring countries quicker
These support models were ad hoc and authorized by the UN Security Council on a case-by-case
basis.25 Under AMIB, bilateral donors provided
minimal support to the TCCs through a trust fund
but the bulk of the operation was self-financed by
the lead state: South Africa. AMIS was largely paid
for through direct donor support (primarily the
EU) but TCCs also benefited from in-kind enabling
support from a number of bilateral partners as well
as UN “light” then “heavy” support packages. The
re-hatting of the AU mission into the AU-UN
Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) gave it
access to the UN-peacekeeping/assessed budget in
addition to other forms of UN support. AMISOM
went from a direct donor support model similar to
that used in AMIS, to one where the UNpeacekeeping/assessed budget supported certain
aspects of the AU mission (through UNSOA) while
the EU paid for the peacekeepers’ allowances, and
other partners provided in-kind support in the
form of training and equipment (see section 3
below).
In late 2012, the AU also asked the UN Security
Council to adopt this model for the African-led
International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA).
However, in his report to the Security Council, the
UN Secretary-General cautioned that “funda-
24 It should be noted that the case of UNISFA (2011), where the UN rapidly deployed troops from neighboring Ethiopia, would temper this argument.
25 For an overview and discussion see Linnéa Gelot, Ludwig Gelot, and Cedric de Coning, eds., Supporting African Peace Operations (Uppsala: The Nordic Africa
Institute, 2012).
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
mental questions on how the force would be led,
sustained, trained, equipped and financed remain
unanswered.” Based on lessons from the AMISOM
experience, the report also emphasized that “the
Council play an active role in ensuring that
African-led forces and Malian forces engaged in
any offensive military operations in the north are
held fully accountable for their actions” and that the
AU’s “request to the Security Council to authorize a
UN support package for an offensive military
operation raises serious questions” in terms of the
UN’s image, and hence its ability to play other
humanitarian and peacekeeping roles.26 The fact
that the Security Council ultimately authorized
AFISMA in December 2012, but subsequently
denied it the same kind of logistical and financial
UN support package as AMISOM, created friction
between African TCCs and the AU, and the UN. It
also meant that the limited logistical and financial
capabilities of some of the African TCCs ensured
that AFISMA’s initial deployment timetable
suggested a target date of September 2013. As it
turned out, France’s Operation Serval launched in
January 2013 accelerated the process significantly,
but African troops deployed to Mali remained
dependent on voluntary contributions to an AU
trust fund and support from bilateral donors—
which represented a return to the AMIB/AMIS
collaborative model. In March 2013, the UN
Security Council started discussing the creation of
a UN peacekeeping operation in Mali, which would
likely absorb troops from AFISMA.
In addition, the counter-LRA Regional Task
Force provides a potential fifth model, which
consists of a coalition of the willing (four national
armies) authorized by the AU and benefiting from
in-kind support from bilateral donors (primarily
the US), as well as UN peacekeeping operations
present in those countries.27
While there is no optimal, one-size-fits-all
support model for AU operations, the AU’s inability
to finance and sustain its own peace operations has
made UN-AU partnerships on peace operations
highly unequal. The AU has consistently voiced its
13
concerns about the subsequent ad hoc approach
and the resulting unequal division of labor. While
the AU has deployed—with significant assistance
from external actors—into high-risk peace enforcement operations, it has not been able to sustain
these operations without external financial and
logistical support from donors and the UN. This
mutual dependence has pushed the two organizations to set aside some of their major differences for
practical and political reasons in some cases (e.g.,
AMISOM) but not others (e.g., AFISMA). Indeed,
the AU has noted that this “major gap between the
PSC’s willingness to authorize such missions and
the AU’s ability to implement them” risks
undermining the credibility of the AU Peace and
Security Council.28
In this context, the challenges for moving toward
more “balanced” and institutionalized collaboration, and ultimately more effective AU-UN
strategic partnerships on peace operations occur at
three levels: (1) at the political level between the
two councils; (2) at the organizational level between
the organizations’ bureaucracies; but also (3) intraAU dynamics, namely, relations among the AU
Commission, the PSC, and AU member states.
At the political level, the two organizations must
overcome their sometimes divergent interpretations of Chapter VIII of the UN Charter so that
they can throw their respective political clout and
legitimacy behind peace operations in Africa. On
the positive side, the UN and the AU have increasingly recognized their comparative advantages and
the need to collaborate. The UN has also had to
deal with growing distrust toward its activities
displayed by several African host governments,
notably Sudan, Chad, and DRC. It is also clear that
the current international financial climate is
pushing the UN (and the EU) to look for ways to
cut costs, including by utilizing special political
missions and operations with “lighter footprints.”
This makes the AU’s ability to conduct less
expensive peace operations considerably more
attractive. On the other hand, while the two
councils agree on the need “to enhance the
26 Report of the Secretary-General on the Situation in Mali, UN Doc. S/2012/894 (November 29, 2012).
27 In November 2011, the AU Peace and Security Council authorized the Regional Cooperation Initiative for the Elimination of the LRA (RCI-LRA). The Initiative is
made up of three components: (1) The Joint Coordination Mechanism located in Bangui, Central African Republic is chaired by the AU Commissioner for Peace
and Security and composed of the defense ministers of the affected countries. (2) The Regional Task Force (RTF) comprises some 5,000 troops from the affected
countries with a headquarters in Yambio, Republic of South Sudan,. (3) The Joint Intelligence and Operations Centre, based in Dungu, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, which provides planning and monitoring functions for the RTF.
28 African Union, Moving Africa Forward: African Peace and Security Architecture 2010 Assessment Study, Addis Ababa: 2010, para. 68.
14
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
predictability, sustainability and flexibility of
financing of the African Union’s peace and security
capability … [and] to enhance the capacity of the
African Union in undertaking peacekeeping
operations,”29 there is not always consistency and
consensus on how to do this. As noted above, this
was made clear during the January 2012 meeting of
the UN Security Council on the UN-AU partnership on peace and security when the AU said the
UN Security Council must “afford due consideration to our [the AU’s] legitimate requests and
address, in a more systematic manner, the funding
of AU‐led peace support operations undertaken
with the consent of the UN.”30
The second challenge is for the UN and AU
bureaucracies to become more effective partners.
Although DPKO was only established in early 1992,
the UN has more than sixty years of peacekeeping
experience, and currently fields about 95,000
uniformed personnel deployed in field missions
costing approximately $8 billion per year. In
contrast, the AU is only ten years old, has virtually
no dedicated peace operations budget, and therefore has limited headquarters, planning, and
logistics capacities. The UN’s ten-year capacitybuilding program for the AU (2006-2016) and the
opening of the UN Office to the AU (UNOAU) in
Addis Ababa in 2010 have clearly helped fill some
of these gaps. But it is often forgotten that the AU
has been expected to build its new capacities while
conducting major fire-fighting operations in
response to multiple, simultaneous, and ongoing
crises across the continent. This has made for a
hugely unequal relationship between the two
organizations’ bureaucracies, not only in terms of
human and financial resources but also in terms of
operating procedures. For example, UNOAU has
more personnel designated to support the capacitybuilding of the AU’s Peace Support Operations
Division than the AU has for planning and running
its peace operations. The unequal personnel levels
were also evident in the joint UN-AU assessment
missions and reviews where the UN has
contributed the large majority of staff and financial
29
30
31
32
and logistical resources. In such circumstances,
external assistance packages run the risk of
engaging in “capacity-substitution” (where external
actors perform tasks for the AU) rather than
genuine “capacity-building” (where external actors
work with the AU while leaving behind enhanced
local capacities). The unequal relationship is also
reflected in the UN’s greater ability than the AU to
maintain institutional knowledge and information
management tools. These inequities make it
difficult to consistently replicate successful
processes such as the 2012 AMISOM surge.
The third and final challenge relates to what we
label intra-AU relations, namely, dynamics between
the AU Commission, the PSC, and the AU’s own
member states. Here, the AU Commission is
working to increase the political and financial
commitment of the AU’s member states to the
organization’s peace operations. This is essential if
the AU wants to become less dependent on external
actors. To date, the AU’s peace operations have
relied heavily on a handful of troop- and policecontributing states, which also bore the majority of
the costs.31 While there are positive signs that the
pool of African TCCs/PCCs is increasing, most of
them continue to favor UN-led operations over AU
operations, at least in part due to the superior
logistical support package and troop and contingent-owned equipment reimbursement rates.32 For
this to change, the AU will have to provide better
bureaucratic, logistical, and financial support
packages to its operations. On the other hand, it is
important to recall that the major TCCs that have
worked in AU peace enforcement operations have
displayed few caveats, greater willingness to
shoulder risks, and brought valuable cultural and
language traits to their respective theaters of
operation.
A similar commitment gap has emerged in the
AU’s financial sector with some AU states failing to
pay their annual dues and the Union’s Peace Fund
struggling to get deposits from most member
states.33 In theory, as stated in Article 21 of the
Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the Peace
UN Security Council Presidential Statement, UN Doc. SC/10067, October 22, 2010.
Statement by Ambassador Ramtane Lamamra, UN Doc. S/PV.6702, January 12, 2012, p.8.
Notably South Africa in Burundi (2003) and the Comoros (2006, 2008); Nigeria and Rwanda in Darfur (2004); and Uganda and Burundi in Somalia (2007).
This was exemplified by the transition from AMIS to UNAMID in Darfur when many more African TCCs/PCCs offered to join the mission. Overall, African
TCCs increased their share of contribution to UN operations from 29 percent in 2008 to 38 percent in 2011, making about 50 percent of UN troops deployed on
the African continent.
33 AU member states will apparently pay only $122,866,637 or 44 percent of the Union’s 2013 budget of $278,226,622.
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
and Security Council (2002), in relation to peace
operations, member state TCCs/PCCs should bear
the costs of such operations during the first three
months while the AU will reimburse them within a
maximum period of six months and then proceed
to finance the operation. In reality, however, this
system has not worked. A further problem is that
the long-term financial repercussions of the
domestic turmoil in two of the AU’s largest contributors—Libya and Egypt—remain unclear. Two
high-level panels were formed to analyze the
financial dimensions of African peace operations:
one chaired by former Italian Prime Minister
Romano Prodi34 (2008) looked at the issue of peace
operations specifically; and one chaired by former
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo (2011)
examined alternative sources of financing for the
AU more generally. So far, however, neither has
produced major changes. Most recently, the two
councils have emphasized that “regional organizations have the responsibility to secure human,
financial, logistical and other resources for their
organizations, including through contributions by
their members and support from partners.”35 The
election of a new chairperson of the AU
Commission may present an opportunity for
reforming the AU and encouraging its member
states to commit more financial resources to the
organization’s initiatives.
15
2) As the only peace operation launched under AU
command and control between 2007 and late
2012, AMISOM has been the central focus of
subsequent debates about UN-regional cooperation with respect to peace operations.
3) Over the last three years AMISOM became the
biggest and most complex peace operation the
AU has ever conducted. As such, it starkly
exposed the limits of the AU’s capabilities
(material, financial, and bureaucratic) and
reiterated the importance of finding workable
partnerships with various external actors,
including the UN.
4) AMISOM was never an “ordinary” peacekeeping operation but was rather tasked with a
combination of objectives that revolved around
VIP protection, war-fighting, counterinsurgency, and facilitating humanitarian
assistance. This has complicated efforts to
support it through mechanisms designed for
more traditional UN peacekeeping missions.
5) Debates about how to sustain AMISOM led to
the creation of an unprecedented UN-AU
collaborative mechanism: the UN Support
Office for AMISOM (UNSOA), which provides
logistical support to AMISOM using UN
assessed contributions and the AMISOM Trust
Fund.36
The experiences of the AU Mission in Somalia
(AMISOM) have exemplified both positive and
negative aspects of the UN-AU relationship.
AMISOM has been a particularly important test
case for the evolution of collaboration between the
two councils for several reasons.
6) Especially in AMISOM’s early years, the mission
exposed some important differences in the UN
and AU approaches to peace operations. Most
notably, in spite of repeated AU calls for a transition of AMISOM into a “blue helmet” mission,
the UN repeatedly refused to deploy a UN force
to Mogadishu arguing that the circumstances on
the ground were not appropriate for such a blue
helmet mission.
1) It is in the laboratory of big missions, like
AMISOM, that the UN-AU relationship has
been forced to develop.
7) And, finally, AMISOM has involved more
institutional partnerships than arguably any
other peace operation in the post-Cold War era.
The AMISOM Experience
34 The Prodi Panel noted that while African missions have been able to stabilize certain situations and provide a first response, their capacity to sustain a long-term
commitment has been limited. It made a number of recommendations to strengthen the relationship between the AU and UN. These focused primarily on
assuring reliable and sustainable funding for AU peace support operations.
35 Communiqué of the consultative meeting between members of the Security Council of the United Nations and the Peace and Security Council of the African
Union, June 2012, para. 11.
36 Established in January 2009 by UN Security Council Resolution 1863, UNSOA provides logistical support in the functional areas of supply (rations, fuel, and
general supply); engineering, including construction, power generation and water supply; medical support; aviation; transportation; strategic movement support;
equipment repair and maintenance; public information; strategic and tactical communications; and information and technology support. It represents the first
time the UN funded a regional peace operation through UN assessed contributions. It was recommended by the Prodi Panel (2008) and was consistent with the
UN’s ten-year plan to strengthen the AU’s capacity in peacekeeping. The main problems have been that UNSOA was authorized to provide logistical support to
AMISOM as if it were an “ordinary” UN peacekeeping operation, which it was not, and that the UNSOA package focused on the mission’s military component,
which caused problems as AMISOM became more multidimensional.
16
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
As a consequence, it has involved a more
complicated mix of parties than just the UN and
AU.
AMISOM was initially established as an exit
strategy for the Ethiopian military, which had
occupied Mogadishu in order to support Somalia’s
Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Its initial
deployment was controversial for two main
reasons. First, when launching the mission, the
Ethiopian delegation broke the Peace and Security
Council’s internal rules of procedure,37 and the AU
Commissioner called for the UN Security Council
to take over the mission without securing the
agreement of the relevant authorities in New York.
The net result was that AMISOM did not transition
into a UN operation as initially envisaged. Second,
most AU states voted with their feet and refused to
deploy troops to Mogadishu, in some cases after
conducting their own technical assessment
missions to the city. Until late 2011, Uganda and
Burundi were the only troop-contributing
countries: they provided soldiers on a similar
model to the donor-support approach used during
the AMIB operation in Burundi (2003-04).
Between March 2007 and mid-2011, AMISOM
was essentially embroiled in a bloody struggle;
caught between various anti-Transitional Federal
Government forces—most notably al-Shabaab—
fighting for control of the city of Mogadishu. To
that end, it received unprecedented UN logistical
support from 2009; unprecedented financial
support from a range of donors but most
importantly the EU, which used its African Peace
Facility to pay allowances to AMISOM uniformed
personnel; as well as various in-kind (training and
equipment) bilateral support packages to its troopcontributing countries (Uganda and Burundi),
most notably from the United States.
AMISOM’s major breakthroughs came in August
2011, when al-Shabaab forces withdrew from
central Mogadishu, and in late 2011, when Kenyan
and Ethiopian forces launched major military
operations against al-Shabaab. These operations
promoted a major rethink of AMISOM operations.
During December 2011, the UN, AU, and a variety
of other partners worked together on a Joint
Technical Assessment Mission that subsequently
produced new strategic and military concepts of
operations for AMISOM. The new concepts of
operations were endorsed by the AU Peace and
Security Council and the UN Security Council on
January 5, and February 22, 2012, respectively.38 In
January 2012, the UN Special Representative of the
Secretary-General for Somalia moved his office
back to Mogadishu after an absence of seventeen
years.
It is important to recall that the UN Security
Council’s decision to endorse the new concept of
operations in February 2012 came nearly eighteen
months after it had rejected the AU’s previous
request—in late 2010—that it fund an increase in
AMISOM’s troop strength to 20,000 personnel. At
that stage, the UN’s Military Staff Committee had
assessed the AU’s request to be too high.
Consequently, UN Security Council Resolution
1964 (December 22, 2010) endorsed a troop
increase for AMISOM from 8,000 to only 12,000.
The Security Council’s fundamental problem was
apparently the lack of clarity about how the AU
generated the figure of 20,000, and hence it
remained unwilling to finance these extra troops if
the AU could not provide the detailed operational
military analysis to demonstrate why they were
required.
These two very different outcomes suggest that
the collaborative process of conducting a Joint
Technical Assessment Mission involving AU
officials and personnel from the newly established
UNOAU (as well as other key partners) was the
principal difference that produced the positive
result, namely, a mission assessment and a new
concept of operations that both councils were
prepared to endorse. The establishment of the
UNOAU has therefore already delivered important
dividends: it has provided the AU with technical
and political support, nurtured a more trusting
37 Despite being a key party to the conflict under discussion, the Ethiopian representative played a crucial role in the debate to establish AMISOM. Under Article 8.9
of the Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union (2002) Ethiopia’s representative should have withdrawn from the
deliberations after the briefing session. Article 8.9 states: “Any Member of the Peace and Security Council which is party to a conflict under consideration by the
Peace and Security Council shall not participate either in the discussion or the decision making process relating to that conflict or situation. Such Member shall be
invited to present its case to the Peace and Security Council as appropriate, and shall, thereafter, withdraw from proceedings.” Instead, the Ethiopian representative
even sought to chair the meeting, arguing that her country was not a party to the conflict.
38 See AU Peace and Security Council, AU Doc. PSC/PR/COMM.(CCCVI), January 5, 2012 and UN Security Council Resolution 2036 (February 22, 2012)
S/RES/2036.
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
relationship, and helped bring the UN to the AU’s
doorstep in Addis Ababa. For its part, it seems clear
that the AU also began to view the UNOAU as a
valuable partner. This joint approach has since been
replicated in devising operational responses to the
crisis in Mali (since November 2012).
After AMISOM’s expansion during 2012, the
mission made considerable progress: it helped
facilitate an end to Somalia’s transitional government; it put al-Shabaab on the back foot; it received
pledges of additional troop- and policecontributing countries; it expanded operations
across four land sectors covering most of southcentral Somalia and a maritime sector (although it
lacked significant maritime assets);39 it established a
new force headquarters staffed by personnel from
over a dozen African countries, and started moving
its mission command to Mogadishu complete with
multidimensional components. These advances
generated greater confidence within the AU about
its own abilities and the once incessant calls for the
UN to re-hat AMISOM into a blue helmet mission
subsided.
However, with the selection of the new Federal
Government of Somalia in August-September 2012
both the AU and the UN decided to re-assess their
engagement with the country and both institutions
engaged in strategic reviews.
The AU’s review team was formed in midDecember 2012 under the chairmanship of veteran
diplomat, Ibrahim Gambari. It had two key tasks:
decide how best to engage with the new Federal
Government and support its priorities, and find a
sustainable solution to AMISOM’s chronic funding
problems. In mid-January 2013, the review team
announced their conclusion that AMISOM should
be transitioned into a new hybrid arrangement with
the UN: parallel AU and UN missions joined at the
strategic level by a joint special representative. The
AU mission, the review team concluded, should
remain a large, multi-dimensional force, dedicated
to continued peace enforcement activities, like
AMISOM but probably with some reconfiguration
of the balance between its component parts. It
called on the UN to authorize a new peacebuilding
17
office to focus on supporting the Federal
Government’s priorities, including the empowerment and restructuring of the Somali security
sector. At the heart of this new joint arrangement
would be a more predictable source of financial
support for the AU mission, which would come via
the UN’s assessed contribution peacekeeping
budget.
The UN review team, however, reached different
conclusions. It quickly ruled out the deployment of
a UN peacekeeping operation and instead deliberated among four forms of UN mission configurations short of a blue-helmet operation:
• a UN assistance mission parallel to AMISOM and
a UN country team;
• a UN peacebuilding mission parallel to AMISOM
and UNSOA;
• an integrated UN peacebuilding mission
encompassing UNSOA and the UN’s Political
Office for Somalia (UNPOS); and
• a joint AU-UN mission along the lines of
UNAMID (The UN/AU hybrid operation in
Darfur), with a separate UN country team.
In late January 2013, the UN Secretary-General
subsequently recommended the Council establish a
new UN Assistance Mission—in addition to
UNSOA—which would deliver political and
peacebuilding support with a presence across
Somalia.40 Probably in light of this decision, the AU
moved toward adopting option 2 in its strategic
review, i.e., an enhanced AMISOM as an interim
prelude to its preferred option of a new joint
arrangement.
After a subsequent period of consultations
between the UN, the AU, and the Federal
Government of Somalia, a new way forward for
AMISOM was agreed to in Security Council
Resolution 2093 (March 6, 2013). The resolution
welcomed “the Strategic Reviews of both the United
Nations and the African Union on their presence
and engagement in Somalia, and the decisions taken
by both organizations to enhance collaboration on
the basis of comparative advantage and a clear
division of labour, and underlining the importance
39 The funding of maritime assets was a controversial issue during the negotiations of Resolution 2036. While some Council members (India, South Africa, and the
US) supported the AU request for an additional expansion of the support package to also cover some maritime assets, this was not included in the resolution.
When the issue was reconsidered by the UN in early 2013, however, the Somali government expressed opposition to such an AMISOM maritime component. See
the comments by Fawzia Yusuf Adan, Somalia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, in UN Doc. S/PV.6921, February 14, 2013, p.5.
40 United Nations Security Council, Report of the Secretary-General on Somalia, UN Doc. S/2013/69, January 31, 2013.
18
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
of both organizations improving their coordination
with one another.” In this spirit, it authorized a new
UN Special Political Mission to work in tandem
with an enhanced AMISOM force (at the same level
of 17,731 uniformed personnel and with the same
UN logistical support package) to, among other
things, reduce the threat posed by al-Shabaab and
other armed opposition groups, support reconciliation processes, assist in the implementation of
Somalia’s new national security plans, to extend the
new government’s authority across the country, and
to facilitate the provision of humanitarian assistance
and civilian protection tasks.
Ongoing Challenges
Despite the significant progress described above,
some major ongoing challenges continue to hamper
collaboration between the UN Security Council
and the AU Peace and Security Council with
respect to peace operations. Our subsequent
recommendations are intended to overcome these
obstacles and deliver more effective partnerships
for peace operations in Africa.
BUILDING TRUST
The overarching challenge continues to be a lack of
deep trust between the two councils. Building trust
takes time and must be earned but this process can
be accelerated through repeated collaborative
practices on concrete issues, such as through joint
planning initiatives and joint assessments missions.
This was demonstrated in the last two annual
consultations between members of the two
councils. These were widely regarded as positive in
large part because they purposely avoided
discussing the issue of Chapter VIII and focused on
specific policy issues rather than broad themes
about the relationship between the two councils.
The UN Security Council continues to view the
AU’s ambitions with some suspicion and for this
reason has presented these annual meetings as
taking place between individual members of the
Security Council—not the council itself as an
entity—and the AU Peace and Security Council.
Nevertheless, this issue is unlikely to completely
disappear and could resurface the next time the two
councils disagree on a specific issue, i.e., the next
time the UN Security Council does not endorse a
“first call” proposal made by the AU or a REC, or
endorses such a proposal but does not provide the
expected logistical and financial UN support
package, as in the case of the UN-authorized
AFISMA in Mali. There is currently no established
working procedure for the meetings between the
two councils, nor any form of dispute resolution
mechanism should the two councils disagree on a
specific African peace and security challenge.
Moreover, while previous annual consultations
have ended in communiqués they have not resulted
in concrete actions or action points for the
following year.
CULTURE CLASH?
Beyond the annual consultations, different bureaucratic cultures have further impeded collaboration
between the two councils. Key issues include
following:
• the lack of coordination between the monthly
agendas of the two councils (while the UN
Security Council has a formal public agenda, the
AU Peace and Security Council does not) and the
agenda for their annual meeting;
• different working methods, including over how
the councils adopt communiqués/resolutions;41
and
• the absence of regular communication between
the respective presidents of the two councils.
Timing is also an issue inasmuch as the AU Peace
and Security Council rarely meets far enough in
advance to feed its positions/decisions into the UN
Security Council’s work agenda—for instance, on
mandate renewal issues. This can significantly limit
the Security Council’s ability to give “due consideration” to the AU Peace and Security Council’s
requests. Nor are there currently any standard
operating procedures for the AU to submit a
request to the Security Council for consideration—
whether for financial or diplomatic support.
JOINT ASSESSMENTS AND AVOIDING
CAPACITY SUBSTITUTION
Despite the establishment of a number of UN-AU
peace and security coordination mechanisms since
2007, these have not always resulted in a shared
41 The AU Commission has a greater role in drafting such documents than the UN Secretariat. In the UN, permanent members of the UN Security Council have the
monopoly over “pen holding,” i.e., leading the drafting process, although in coordination and with support from the UN Secretariat’s relevant departments.
Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams
vision of how to tackle crises in Africa. Joint assessments and planning between the UN and the AU
have been occurring more frequently lately,
including in the joint Sahel mission, AMISOM’s
surge, and over Mali. But such assessments remain
context-specific rather than on the basis of a shared
strategic vision. This is not necessarily a problem
but it does illustrate that while improved cooperation may exist between the two bureaucracies at the
technical level this does not automatically generate
a successful partnership at the political level
between the two councils. In each case, the UN has
provided most capacities, which runs the risk of
providing “capacity substitution” rather than
genuine collaboration and capacity-building. The
AU’s limited human and financial resources and its
limited ability to maintain institutional knowledge
and information management tools also make it
difficult to consistently replicate successful
processes when they do occur.
While the newly created UNOAU in Addis Ababa
has played an important operational role in
supporting these joint planning exercises and
helping to prepare the annual consultations
between the two councils (by producing briefing
papers and background notes), it has had a more
limited impact at the political level in part due to
the relatively low level of its special representative.
The political role UNOAU could or should play in
between annual meetings of the councils has yet to
be clarified. There is also currently no mechanism
for facilitating regular meetings between the UN
Secretary-General and the Chairperson of the AU
Commission.
A UNIFIED AU VOICE IN NEW YORK
The AU should have a much stronger voice in New
York: the AU representation lacks both a strong
mandate and capacities and therefore cannot play
an effective bridging role between the AU Peace
and Security Council and the African member
states in New York. Unlike the UN’s new institutional presence in Addis Ababa (the UNOAU),
which has dedicated specialists and subject matter
experts, the AU’s representation in New York does
not have peace and security experts such as
19
planners for peace operations or military advisers.
Such personnel could liaise with the UN
DPKO/DFS and DPA at a working level and
provide expert advice to the AU ambassador.
While an African member of the Security
Council traditionally presides over the New Yorkbased “Ad Hoc Working Group on Conflict
Prevention and Resolution in Africa,” this forum
has not been sufficiently utilized to convey
common AU positions on pressing issues. The
“Africa Group” is also hamstrung by the fact that it
includes a non-AU member, Morocco. Some of
these problems might be remedied if the AU Peace
and Security Council had an explicit presence in
New York, but its fifteen members do not currently
exist as a caucus there, and elected African
members on the UN Security Council do not
necessarily hold concurrent seats on the Peace and
Security Council in Addis Ababa. Consequently,
Africa’s representatives on the UN Security Council
may not always be informed of AU Peace and
Security Council positions and decisions in a timely
manner. An additional political issue is that even
when a clear AU position is articulated, African
members of the UN Security Council may not
automatically represent this official AU position in
New York and vote in accordance with it.42
Recommendations
The following recommendations are intended to
help overcome these challenges to enhanced collaboration. It is important to recall, however, that the
essence of the relationship between the two
councils and their members is political.
Consequently, no amount of institutional reconfiguration will completely dispel the political frictions
that are bound to occur when controversial issues
and crises are discussed. There is an unavoidable
trade-off between creating new mechanisms,
enhancing the capabilities of existing institutional
structures, and providing flexible arrangements
which are nimble enough to adapt to unforeseen
and rapidly evolving peace and security challenges.
Nevertheless, we recommend that both organizations could usefully take the following steps:
42 This occurred in the vote over UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011) imposing a “no-fly zone” over Libya and authorizing civilian protection measures. All
three elected African members of the Security Council (Gabon, Nigeria, and South Africa) voted in favor in spite of an earlier AU communiqué rejecting “any
military intervention, whatever its form.”
20
PEACE OPERATIONS, THE AFRICAN UNION, AND THE UNITED NATIONS
FOR THE TWO COUNCILS
• Ensure greater levels of coordination between the
monthly agendas of the two councils, especially
in relation to African country/regional issues and
related thematic discussions, including protection of civilians; women, peace and security; and
children and armed conflict. This would be
significantly improved if the AU Peace and
Security Council adopted a formal public agenda
in a similar fashion to the UN Security Council.
• Develop agreed working procedures for the AU
to submit a request to the UN Security Council
for consideration—whether for financial or
diplomatic support.
• Develop agreed working procedures for drafting
and adopting the communiqués that emerge
from the annual consultations between the
members of the two councils. These
communiqués should include a list of concrete
actions or action points for the following year.
• Increase the frequency of communication
between (1) the UN Secretary-General and the
Chairperson of the AU Commission; and (2) the
respective presidents of the two councils,
including through greater use of video teleconferences (VTCs).
FOR THE AFRICAN UNION
• The AU’s representation in New York should be
enhanced to include a cadre of peace and security
experts such as planners for peace operations and
military advisers. Such personnel should liaise
with the UN DPKO/DFS and DPA at a working
level and provide expert advice to the AU
ambassador.
• The AU Peace and Security Council should
establish a dedicated representation in New York.
Its principal tasks could include facilitating
timely communication between the two councils
and helping to disseminate the PSC’s positions
throughout the New York-based UN Africa
Group and newly created African Caucus.
• Develop a mechanism through which elected
African members on the UN Security Council
that do not hold concurrent seats on the AU
Peace and Security Council in Addis Ababa can
obtain some kind of special “observer” or participant status in the PSC.
• Enhance the ability of the AU Commission to
maintain institutional knowledge/memory and
develop relevant information management tools
for tasks related to peace operations. Such tasks
should include lessons-learned analysis, performance evaluation, and the drafting of official
mission histories.
FOR THE UNITED NATIONS
• Clarify the role the UNOAU in Addis Ababa
should play in the periods between the annual
consultations between members of the two
councils.
• Ensure that the UN-AU capacity-building
programs, as well as joint assessment missions
and joint planning exercises, avoid capacitysubstitution.
21
Annex
Organizational Chart
The INTERNATIONAL PEACE INSTITUTE (IPI) is an independent,
international not-for-profit think tank with a staff representing
more than twenty nationalities, with offices in New York, facing
T
United Nations headquarters, and in Vienna. IPI is dedicated to
promoting the prevention and settlement of conflicts between
and within states by strengthening international peace and
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